Good Eats
Food Network

For the last 11 years, Food Network has been a reflection and arbiter of American cooking. Every couple of years a new set of chefs become the hot hosts. First it was Emeril Lagasse and Sara Moulton, then Bobby Flay and Jamie Oliver and now Rachel Ray and Tyler Florence rule the airtime. Going back to 1963 when Julia Child broadcast her first episode on PBS, however, the format of these shows has rarely changed. Typically, the host, surrounded by warm earth tones and filmed through a gauzy camera lens, walks the viewer through a complete, often themed, menu.

One exception to the standard format is "Good Eats," hosted and created by Alton Brown. What separates "Good Eats" from most other cooking shows is that it is ingredient, not recipe driven. While certainly shows such as "Iron Chef" and "Unwrapped" also tend to be ingredient driven, "Good Eats" concentrates on the biological and chemical makeup of the ingredient and its reaction to the cooking process. From how connective tissue becomes gelatin, to killing bacteria, the true star of the show is science.

Every TV chef has a cookie recipe. But "Good Eats" shows how the ingredients of a cookie work together when prepared. With that knowledge, we learn how to make our favorite style of cookie, whether it be flat, puffy or chewy. The particular recipes on the show are less important than the concepts we can apply to our own cooking. So while you may forget Brown's recipe for blueberry muffins, you will not forget that if you toss your blueberries in dry muffin batter before mixing them into the completed batter, they will not sink to the bottom of the muffin.

The show's tone further separates it from its Food Network brethren. It is low on pretense and high on screwball; think "Beakman's World" meets "The Frugal Gourmet." To demonstrate how paneeing alters the surface to mass ratio of beef, Brown steamrolls a roast in the street. When it comes to any discussion of kitchen tools, enter "W," the "equipment specialist" who is cast as a black-clad secret agent with haughty disdain for Brown's supposed ignorance and childishness.

To be sure, Brown's fondness for skits, costumes and seventh-grade science project diagrams are admittedly juvenile at times, and sometimes cringe-worthy. Particularly vexing are the skits — often involving a fictitious sister — that drag on far too long with neither humor nor information. But overall they are no worse than the false romanticism and hearth-spun stories about treasured family recipes we get from most cooking shows.

Alton Brown is a honky's honky, and on Food Network, that's saying something. A former cinematographer and video director, Brown attended the New England Culinary Institute for the sole purpose of acquiring the technical knowledge necessary to create this very specific style of cooking show. That knowledge, combined with an obvious passion for the show and his quirky personal style make "Good Eats" one of the most entertaining programs on the network. Acknowledging his appeal, Food Network has tapped Brown to be the host/commentator of "Iron Chef America," its Americanized incarnation of the wildly popular Japanese hit.

"Good Eats" is not afraid to say that cooking and food preparation are largely science, not a gift to be divined from the mystics. Ingredients are not described as gorgeous and flavors do not marry each other. Instead, it's basic cooking, detailed equipment analysis and hand puppets. But along the way you'll learn why every turkey should be submerged in heavily salted water overnight before cooking and why there would be no toast without the Maillard Reaction.

For a network long on chefs standing behind kitchen islands assembling seasonal menus, "Good Eats" is a welcome break; it's not what to cook, it's how to cook. And for the vast majority of us, that is exactly what we need most.

— Patrick Quirk (pquirk@gmail.com)